So You Want
by SilveringBlue
Summary: Dairine finds Roshaun in the most surprising of places. Hijinks ensue. Basically pure DairRo fluff.
1. So You Want to Find a Prince

In the bustle of the Crossings, where a thousand alien species travel and shop and eat and _grenfelz _and _!*!f!^ _every day, it's not always easy to provide streamlined and efficient customer service.

At least, that's what Dairine Callahan told herself as she took a deep, centering, non-entropy-increasing breath through her nose and attempted to address the Crossings Records customer service representative again.

"Look, can you just give me authorization for my manual? You don't have to get the documents manually or do anything, just _give me the authorization number." _

The representative, a glistening fist-sized dodecahedron on three skinny towering legs that put it at least a foot higher than Dairine's measly five-two, waved two of its ten feathery feelers at her. This translated on its touch-screen desk to "Processing. Please hold...Request denied."

"Come _on!" _Dairine yelled at the Ysad, stamping a foot in what she knew was a childish way. She'd had to wait hours on hold, then had been passed through four different agents before she reached this current one, who seemed about fifty times thicker than the previous ones. And _that _was truly saying something. If Sker'ret had been in town, he probably would have been able to get her through this nightmare of petty beauracracy much more easily, but unfortunately he was in the middle of an interventation on Rirhait C and his broodfather had just given Dairine the evil eye. Several of them, actually.

"Do you have any further requests?" the representative signaled politely.

"Yes, whether I can kick your _slimy blue anterior angle!"_

"Processing...please hold...request denied."

"_Ahhgg!"_

"Should wait until Sker'ret returns," Spot said from his vantage point. The little wizardly laptop had gained tiny metal legs at some point during his many "updates" and was using them to cling tightly to her back and extend an optical sensor over her shoulder. Luckily he had converted to an ultralight plastic/chitin hybrid, so he wasn't ruining her t-shirt, but Dairine didn't have the patience to be grateful for these small mercies.

"I only have two months left in summer break, Spot, and I still haven't chased down any of the leads I have on Roshaun. I don't have time to wait for Sker'ret to finish up on Rirhait C and get me the atypical transit records when this _rickety tripod _could get me in the record room in five minutes!" she snapped, flinging her wavy red hair over her shoulder with an exasperated noise.

"You are not authorized to access this level of information," the Ysad signaled. "Would you like to apply for higher status?"

"How long will _that _take?"

"Processing..."

"You know what? Fine. I'll do it, but if this doesn't work, I'm going straight to the nearest planet to find myself some B.E.M.s! If Mr. High-and-Mighty Stationmaster doesn't like it, he can just go twiddle his hyperfoam structure!"

"Request not recognized, please repeat-" the Ysad began. Spot, seeing Dairine's head was about to explode, quickly put in, "She will apply for higher status."

"Request accepted. Please fill out form 21 section a through theta, implement routine 5q subroutines 4[g] through 4[ii] and submit to agent at window 112."

Dairine attempted to fortify herself with another deep breath before picking up a pen and getting to it.

Some time later she slumped, head on the table of one of the sleazy little dives that infested the Crossing's fringes, her grey eyes closed. Spot sat quietly next to her on the pleather booth, humming "_Dataaaa..." _to himself.

"On hold again," Dairine commented in a dead voice to her laptop. She toyed with the little buzzer that would tell her when it was her turn to visit window 112 again. "He better be _really _grateful, is all I'm saying. Honestly, I'm thinking he should get down on his knees and swear that he will never, ever crunch a lollipop again. Or maybe I should get him to stop wearing gangster shirts over those parachute pants...or give him a buzz cut...or- Spot, are you listening to me?"

"Yes, Dairine," the little laptop said meekly, poking a sensor up over the blue glass table

"Were you listening to me _before_?" Dairine said shrewdly.

"No. I was communing with the Crossings' computer network. Several of them are semi-sentient."

"You know, I should really be annoyed with you-" She broke off as the waiter, an otterlike creature with six legs, brought her blue milkshake to the table. Dairine tasted it and grimaced- obviously when they said 'milk', they didn't necessarily mean 'from a cow'. Still, it was sugar and she figured she deserved something sweet after this headache of the day, so she took a long pull before continuing, "-but I'm out of energy for it and I'm actually kind of curious about your whole 'dataaa' thing."

"It could be considered analogous to ingesting food or drink in humans," Spot said after a moment.

"Huh. Well, that's surprisingly innocuous," Dairine said. Really, the 'milk'shake wasn't too bad after all, similar to Thai iced tea. She'd have to make a note of this dive's location for the next time she was stuck in the seven circles of customer service hell, she mused. It wasn't often that she found blue food she actually liked, despite Kit's enthusiasm for the stuff.

"On further thought, however, it could be more accurate to compare it to the act of sexual reproduction," Spot continued in a composed, meditative tone of voice. Dairine spit the shake all over the table.

The Powers were merciful, though, and saved her from having to make some reply to that little statement; a voice whistled behind her, "Dharinn! How wonderful to see you here!"

"S'reee!" she said happily, turning to meet the little smiling eye of the whale hanging next to the table in her personal inch-thick water bubble. Though Dairine didn't know the Senior for the Earth's oceans too well, her sister Nita had been close friends with S'reee for a few years and Dairine had bumped to the whale often enough to know what a wonderful person she was. It also helped that the interruption made it possible to pretend Dairine hadn't heard Spot's disturbing revelation.

"What brings you to this part of the Crossings?" S'reee asked politely, drifting downwards a bit to avoid catching her dorsal fin on the low ceiling.

"Well, I'd be gone already, but I'm on hold. Some idiot at the service and information desk decided I wasn't 'qualified' to access atypical transit records," Dairine grumbled, standing the coin-shaped buzzer on its edge. S'reee chuckled, a thick bubbly sound.

"Poor Dharinn! But you should have just asked me: I'm a Senior, you know! I can give you authorization right now. I'm just heading home after a Crossings to Indian Ocean worldgate consultation so I have plenty of time."

"I _love _you, S'reee," Dairine said ferverently.

S'reee chuckled again and made a 'follow me' gesture with one fin. One short trip back to window 112 plus a now very helpful customer service alien later and Dairine found herself with the entire atypical transit record from R.E. 376 to the present day loaded into her manual.

"So, cousin," S'reee said as they began the hike, or in her case float, back to the transit branch for Earth, "what do you need the records for? Hopefully it's nothing too illegal."

"No...well," Dairine said, and cleared a suddenly tight throat. "Do you remember, on the Moon a couple months ago-"

"Ah, I should have known," S'reee whistled. "The Wellakhit prince. Have you had any success?"

"No. I have a few leads, though, and I've begun to trace a line of research that looks promising." Dairine spoke as clinically as she could, as if this were just another job that needed doing, but the truth was, she had a hard time not choking up when she thought about the day Roshaun had vanished in a blaze of Sunfire and desperation. She could feel the ghost of the Sunburn even now: she had shared a lesser portion of his burden, channeling a tiny bit of white-hot plasma to burn back the encroaching dark matter, and even that secondhand glimpse had made her feel like she was turned to ash where she knelt.

S'reee gave a soft whistle of encouragement. "And may the Powers be guiding you in your search, cousin. Call on me anytime you need anything...ah, there's our gate."

"Thank you, S'reee, I will," Dairine said sincerely, stepping onto her transit circle. S'reee swam into place a few circles away and began to describe a graceful circle, scripted words in the Speech glittering gold around her fins and fluke. Dairine dropped her own transit spell around her and sighed with relief as the Crossings vanished, replaced with her own backyard.

The clock in her room was showing 1 a.m. when Dairine hissed, "_Yess!" _and stabbed a finger triumphantly into Spot's screen.

"Ow," Spot commented, giving Dairine pause for a moment. _When did _he _ grow a sense of humor?_ But it wasn't enough to distract her from her exultation.

"That's _got _to be it, Spot," she told the little laptop, thumping a fist into her Star Wars bedspread for emphasis. "Same date, same time, same general location as when Roshaun vanished- _and _it's recorded as a 'lifeboat' wizardry. I haven't heard of that before, but I think I can guess what it means and that's that Roshaun was smarter than he looked." Just to be sure, she opened a new tab in Spot's Manual interface and ran a search for the spell type. It was a little-used variant on a general personal protection spell. Apparently, it would run in the "background" in order to sense when its wizard was at the end of his or her reserves and then promptly teleport them to a preset safe location. It was really quite clever, but had fallen into disuse since it could only be run as an add-on to a large working due to the way it drained power.

For Roshaun, though, power drain hadn't been the issue, it had been controlling the amount of power he was recieving, so this spell was a perfect fit. "Got to be it," Dairine repeated. "I could just kiss that Stationmaster for being enough of a control freak to record all atypical transits."

"I don't think he'd appreciate that," Spot said.

"Yeah," she answered absently, fingers tapping at the keyboard again in a machine-gun like rattle as she began the second part of her search- to find out where the 'lifeboat' had landed. She read,

[_Transit:: _JD **uncertain due to local spacetime anomoly **estimated 2365.4:: Unauthorized {unrestricted} from CRP 34.56.71-2 point a-67.8 (Terra, satellite a, 'Mare Orientale') to CRP **uncertain due to local spacetime anomoly **via 'lifeboat' (entath 45 reference b-52) routine::

notation: blank

notification: blank

status: closed, transit completed]

_Local spacetime anomoly has got to mean the Pullulus;_ Dairine mused, _and no one else made a transit once the Pullulus was close enough to start affecting our local spacetime structure. However, the reason was that it threw off all calculations and you'd be likely to end up halfway through a wall...or in the heart of a star. He probably thought he'd be fine if _that _happened to him, of course...But I shouldn't get my hopes up._ Still, it was hard to surpress the anticipation that welled up at the thought of finally finding him. The look in Roshaun's parents' eyes still haunted her, and even though she knew they were too good to blame her, she still felt guilt weighing heavily on her shoulders.

After all, it was in defense of a different planet and a different star, with an alien girl by his side, that Roshaun had fallen. Even though he was king of Wellakh. Even though he was sworn to protect his planet, even though he knew that this act would put his parents in danger. She couldn't help but feel that it was her own fault, that their relationship- whatever it was- had caused him to act contrary to his usual mode and resulted in such dire consequences. To find him and bring him home felt like absolution of those sins.

And if she was completely honest with herself, Dairine had to admit that even without these reasons, she'd still be looking for him. Under her "Dyslexia rules KO" pajama tee, the emerald he'd given her still sat on its gently scrolling sentence in the Speech. Absently, she slid it back and forth on the chain.

"Would you like me to search work history for a match?" Spot said, intruding on her introspection.

"What?" Dairine put her hand down and refocused.

"I also participated in that working, and I believe that Roshaun may have passed us the lifeboat spell as part of the plasma-handling routine. We may be able to find the preset destination in my archives."

"I knew you were worth what I paid for you," Dairine said with a grin. "Hit it."

Spot made a soft disk-drive thinking noise for a moment, then pulled up a spell description file. Dairine scanned through the lines of text, many of which bore a resemblance to computer code. She was tired enough that when she came to the relevent section, she scrolled right past before realizing her mistake. There it was: a description of a subroutine titled 'departure- extremis only' that wasn't part of the main spell. And the destination read "G.S. 367-49/45 3-a 34.51 (local idiom: New York)"

_New York._

_Roshaun's on Earth...!_

_**Incredibly Long Author's Note**_: Hi. I feel like I should warn my readers what they're getting into here, because Young Wizards tends to be an intelligent, discriminating sort of fandom. *buttering you up*

Anyway, I've written a lot of fanfic and they have all been really _serious_ and _literary. _Oh, I tried to throw in some humor, but mainly it was about agonizing over whether my characters were true to canon and researching every last detail, etc, and I honestly burned out. I mean, I'd spend half an hour tweaking a phrase and comparing it against a list of quotes to make sure it sounded _exactly _like canon, and the result was I got writer's block like nothing else. Writer's rush-hour-in-Los-Angeles. Writer's _train wreck._

But then I read the Lady Moonglow's fic Have You Ever Been Loved and it cured me. It has a completely non-canon pairing, it's a mushy fluffy love story, it's got several blatant plot devices, and most of the characters are really OOC, but you know what, I _loved _it. To death, and even to a second reading. So, I'm following her example. This is a blatantly mushy, fluffy fic, the characters are most likely OOC, I'm not going to research anything- basically I'm going to do my best impression of an airhead. Also Dairine is not going to be eleven, at all.

Hey, you know, if DD herself can write 30 days of fanfic about Nita and Kit basically being adorable (_she really did! _I'm still over the moon. Message me if you can't find it, it's on her website somewhere) then I can mess with canon to make bubblehead teen romance if I want to, right? Please **REVIEW **and let me knooowww...*puppy eyes*

_**Too long, didn't read**_: It's OOC, I pulled the science-y stuff out of where the sun don't shine, Dairine's a _lot_ _older than eleven_ so that she can kiss Roshaun without me feeling squicky about it, and I'm going to beg shamelessly for reviews (Please? ;)). You've been warned.


	2. Power Trips

"I'm relieved and worried at the same time," Nita said, chin propped on hand as her grey eyes surveyed Dairine across the kitchen table.

"I _know," _Dairine said, snagging one of the banana slices her sister had prepared as an after-school snack. Nita gave her a look that Dairine knew meant, 'you eat my snack, you have to get me another one', but continued her thought.

"I mean, it's _fantastic _that he's alive and well- his parents are going to be ecstatic, did you message them yet?- but why would he be here and not contact us?"

"It can't be that he's pissed for some reason," Kit put in. The Hispanic boy, Nita's long-time partner and recent boyfriend, was lounging in the chair next to Nita, tipping it on two legs and teetering back and forth as he thought. Dairine was trying to ignore his hand casually resting on Nita's knee, but the amount of PDA that the two showed made her want to roll her eyes. It wasn't like they made out in front of people or anything- no, just always touching each other and exchanging long glances and blushing and generally being sweet enough to give her more cavities than Roushaun's lollipop habit.

"No," Dairine agreed. "Roshaun wouldn't sulk like that. I mean, he _sulks_, but first he stalks in and tells you exactly how wrong you are. He's not really a subtle person-"

Nita coughed to cover a smile and Dairine glared at her. "No, he is _not _'like someone else we know', Neets, I know you're going to say that so just don't! Besides, he'd never let his parents think he was dead for this long for whatever reason."

"Yeah, I agree. So, the only thing that's making sense to me here is that there's something preventing him from contacting us. Did you check the post-transit status parameters?" Kit asked.

"I did," Dairine confirmed, rotating Spot's screen so that Kit could see the data for himself. "It doesn't tell me much more then where and when the transit ended and that the traveler exited with all normal functions intact."

"That's a pretty good start," Nita said, leaning towards the display and tracing a number with a finger. "It means that he's uninjured and still in a normal mode of being- not a fugue state or suspended animation or something. And you have somewhere to start looking."

"You _have _tried just a locator spell, right?" Kit said.

"What'd you think I am, a moron?!" Dairine said indignantly. "'Oops, I forgot, a locator, you're a genius! I can't believe I just wasted two months!'"

"_Dairine," _Nita said, giving her a 'big-sister' look, even as Kit chuckled.

Dairine huffed and muttered a quick "Sorry," before continuing more seriously, "They didn't work. Whenever I plugged his name, they'd just fizzle. I tried every variant I could think of- I even messed around with his name-"

"_What?" _Kit and Nita said together, suddenly tense. Dairine understood the reaction- plugging a changed name into a spell, a name that wasn't just a word but the complete description of their personality and mind, could irreversably change the one being named.

_I thought he was dead, though- that it couldn't locate him because he was in Timeheart. Or that somehow the Lone One had captured him, or that he was plasma in the Sun- wouldn't it be more important to find him-?_

However, what came out of her mouth was just, "Relax, Neets, it didn't take anyway. Besides, I didn't mess around with essential personality, just the state-of-being vectors."

"Oh, so you didn't try to change him, just whether he was alive and in the same body?" Nita said, a touch of anger in her words. "Dair, you should know better by now!"

Dairine sighed. "I know, okay? Tom and Carl chewed me out for it a few weeks ago. But I told you, it didn't take. I was trying to see if I could hit on the right name by guesswork."

"But obviously, state-of-being wasn't the problem," Nita agreed. "Well, I'll let it go for now if Tom and Carl already covered this, but you're not off the hook, runt."

"Come on, Neets-!"

"So what was the problem then?" Kit cut in.

"What?"

"If he's in a normal state of being and right here in New York, how come the manual doesn't know what to say and the tracker didn't work?" Kit elaborated, plucking his manual out of his otherspace pocket and riffling through the pages until he came to Roshaun's entry and studying the last recorded instance of his name- from that last disasterous working. "Can something that essential have changed in his personality?"

"Huh," Nita said, distracted. "That's a really good question."

"Roshaun wouldn't become someone else completely just because of spell overload," Dairine objected.

Nita's eyes went wide and she shot up from her seat. Kit, caught by surprise, lost control of his balancing act and his chair went over backwards with an almighty crash. "Aggh! Nita!"

"Oh no- sorry! You okay?" Nita said, trying to help him up but obviously distracted by whatever lightbulb had come on in her head. She looked at Dairine and said urgently, "I think I know what happened to Roshaun."

Dairine's eyes widened and Kit's head popped up over the table to stare at his girlfriend. "Spill!" Dairine urged.

"Okay, okay, I'm trying to figure out how to say this- Well, you know Bobo?" Nita began.

Dairine gagged. "Neets, seriously, can you stop reverting to childhood? I can't believe you're talking about your invisible friend right now."

Nita refused to be annoyed. "Don't be a smartass, Dairine, you know I'm talking about the peridexis. Anyway, when I was trying to save Ronan when he stabbed himself with the Spear, I asked the peridexis for extra power and it warned me what could happen if a wizard tried to channel too much." She passed both Dairine and Kit mental pictures of that moment: _desperation, rainbows in the dark blood, silent Yaldiv looking on- Your mental conduits could be scarred- you would be too sensitive, afterwards, and every use of power would be agony- Just do it, I'll worry about the consequences later._

Dairine blinked and shivered a little at the raw taste of the memory. "Ouch. But what-?"

"Come on, I'm supposed to be the slow one here, not you!" Nita said.

"Wait, you think Roshaun burned himself out? I thought of that already and tried it in the locator-"

"Not just burned out. I think he burned out _and lost wizardry."_

Dairine and Kit got it at the same moment, an expression of mingled horror and enlightment mirrored on their faces. "That would explain everything! His name would change-" Kit said.

"-And he'd lose the memory of the Art, which since he's an alien on Earth would mean he'd basically lose the memory of his whole life on Wellakhit-" Nita went on.

"Right, because there's no explanation other that magic for ending up on a different world! So that's why he hasn't contacted us." Dairine finished, then scowled as another thought occured to her. "Great. He's wandering around in New York with amnesia, looking like some kind of anime freak. That complete idiot!"

"Hey. Dair'," Nita said, correctly reading her aggression as worry and coming around the table to give her a companionable one-armed hug. "Roshaun strikes me as the kind of guy to always land on his feet. And we'll find him. We'll just do it the old-fashioned way."

"He does stick out like a sore thumb, so he won't be too hard to find," Kit agreed. Dairine lifted her chin, suddenly filled with joyful desisiveness. Spot sensed her mood and scrambled into Dairine's backpack.

"So what are we waiting for then?" Dairine picked up the backpack, got up, and held open the porch door for her sister. "Come on, we've got a prince to find...!"

**Annoying Authorial Annotation:**

I know, I know, filler, I apologize. Plus I've sunk low enough to commit the cardinal sin of posting without even a read through edit. orz I just needed to update and it's one A.M. I guess I could stay up another couple hours and churn out the bit where they actually, you know, go out and do stuff, it's just that with the way sleep deprevation hits me they might be doing stuff like fighting giant scissors and riding candy unicorns desu. I'm pushing it as it is because that actually sounds workable to me right now. . So, give me a bit. I had to rewrite this whole chapter anyway because originally Roshaun was going to be in a school and be Sean Kendall because he said "Roshuan ke Nelaid" and someone misheard but I've scrapped it because that's stupid. D:

Actually, amnesia is stupid too but hey, it's 1 AM so I laugh in the face of logic! And brain injury! Hopefully this doesn't burn your eyes too much and Kit falling over is enough action for now. Sorry about the lack of paragraph indents, FFN is awful when it comes to formatting. Finally, I love Kit and Nita. *been rooting for them to make out since SYWTBAW*

**REVIEW** and you too can have giant scissors and candy unicorns! :DDD Thanks so much, "**Hello**", yours is on the house! ;)


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